Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.

No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.

Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.

A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.

Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.